I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past ... Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.

I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, "Then write something. Then you can read it." In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something - and then read it!

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.